Esotera Secure Storage Solutions, St. John’s, NL, Canada has released its Esotera suite of distributed storage products. Founded in 2004, Esotera has developed and launched a solution that builds upon the Cloud to produce a superior storage function.

New Cloud Venture!
Esotera is a Cloud venture we have been helping position for the next main phase of their growth. Based in St Johns, Newfoundland, they are a shining example of how it's possible to create $ billion global innovations from anywhere, you don't have to be in Silicon Valley or even in a large city.

We're also putting a spotlight on them as part of our focus on the development of the Canadian Cloud industry. Our goal is to use this forum to create a cluster to further accelerate this.

InfiniDrive Cloud Storage
In a nutshell the go-to-market strategy for the product is to engage through web hosting and telco providers. With the right combination of product and service partners, the technology can underpin next-generation IaaS for popular applications like Microsoft Sharepoint and Exchange.

The reason the product will prove popular is because of the simplicity with which it solves some pretty significant issues for enterprise IT teams, in particular Business Continuity and Compliance. This is achieved through the core 'InfiniDrive' technology, that encrypts and replicates information across multiple data-centres.

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It's an awesome demonstration of the key principles of what makes Cloud computing so powerful. In particular service providers have a very small product adoption step, simply drop in a number of low-cost commodity hardware servers and with little hands on work or technial skills, be up and running with their own Cloud Storage services.

The business case
Every organization accumulates unstructured data files. These may simply reside in file servers or they may be managed by an application such as Microsoft SharePoint. It is essential that they are be protected from loss or theft.

Esotera fits between your organization and server instances provisioned from the large Cloud Storage vendors such as Amazon and Google. When you save a file it is encrypted and chopped into identical, anonymous blocks that are scattered in triplicate across hundreds of Cloud Storage instances.

Security by numbers:
Unlike conventional storage systems, Esotera does not store a ‘lookup table’ to determine where the blocks are positioned. Instead, these positions are calculated on-the-fly using cryptology algorithms. Only the owner of a file who possesses the encryption key can recreate the sequence to reconstruct a file. Anyone else is faced with making random guesses in a number space of billions of billions across hundreds of service instances. Data stored within Esotera is therefore many orders of magnitude more secure than any conventional system – safer in fact that when it resides intact on your own servers where it is vulnerable to attacks through your firewall.

Instant Recovery from Disaster:
Most Cloud storage solutions work on the backup principle. A copy of your data is redundantly stored in the cloud so that it can be used to restore the state of your servers should they fail. However, even a successful data restoration shuts you down for days or weeks while all that data is pulled back across the web or shipped to you by tape.

Esotera is smarter. When you store data in the Esotera file system, you are essentially creating a primary copy in the Cloud – visible only to you. You only use your local servers as a cache for the encrypted blocks, so should your servers fail, you still have immediate access to every file. They may come in a little more slowly until your cache is refilled, but you can read any file without having to bring down your full data set.

Unlimited Scalability:
Esotera leases more Cloud resources as your need for storage grows. This creates perfect efficiency within an architecture that can grow indefinitely. As you bring more users into the Cloud storage solution, the increased number of server instances adds bandwidth and ensures that all users enjoy fast responses to their file requests. Caching of encrypted blocks occurs at two levels: On the client to ensure a file reopens quickly on that machine and on your local servers to permit files to open quickly when shared across your network.

Accountability:
Regulations exist that require you to manage your unstructured data. Files must be preserved for a specific timeframes, and proof must be provided that these files have not been tampered with. The Esotera solution keeps that data safe, provides a read-only view for external auditing and can provide message digest histories through an independent third-party to support verification of document authenticity.